From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Jun 23 13:18:58 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from gloworm.Stanford.EDU (gloworm.Stanford.EDU [171.64.96.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8D9A514C1B for ; Wed, 23 Jun 1999 13:18:55 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from yergeau@gloworm.Stanford.EDU) Received: from localhost (yergeau@localhost) by gloworm.Stanford.EDU (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA17249; Wed, 23 Jun 1999 13:18:46 -0700 (PDT) Message-Id: <199906232018.NAA17249@gloworm.Stanford.EDU> To: "Kent Ho" Cc: questions@freebsd.org In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 22 Jun 1999 16:44:02 +0800." <19990622084402.1824.qmail@graffiti.net> Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 13:18:46 -0700 From: Dan Yergeau Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG >I want to transfer 6gigabyte worth of user account mainly for mail purposes to a new bigger harddisk. What I want to know is what is the fastest and safe w ay to copy the data across? I can do standard cp but will it be faster to use dd instead. I don't use dd much and cp seems slow on FreeBSD. dd on the raw partitions would only work if the partitions are *exactly* the same size (it would copy all of your superblock information also). Although it would probably be fast (very little cylinder-to-cylinder head movement), I don't even recommend trying it. >Recommendation and opinions welcome.. dump/restore is my recommendation Assuming the old and new partitions are mounted on /oldmail and /newmail # dump -0af - /oldmail | (cd /newmail ; restore -rf -) You may have to do some clean up after it completes. If the directory that you are trying to move is part of a larger partition, then you will have to delete what you don't want. If you are running 3.x and you don't have softupdates turned on already, turn them on (see /usr/src/sys/ufs/ffs/README.softupdates). That should speed up writes significantly. Dan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message